Lady With Wine

It took me a long time to finish his young lady with wine.  I started some time in August and now it is October.  I think I am the slowest artist alive.  I have lots of unfinished art objects in my collection and this morning I decided to finish this one.  The best part, the hanger is already manufactured on the back.  I can hang it today.

 I found some metal calendars at a fantastic price.  I was hoping to use them for some family Christmas photos, so I wanted to make sure I could glue paper over it without the original layer lifting.  I gesso'd the whole calendar.  I had some garbage rings laying on my desk where I had cut apart a binder.  I laid those into gesso to get some texture.  After the gesso dried,  I had some wine glass napkins laying around so I glued one onto the bottom of the calendar.  I got out my sketching pencil and drew in the woman and her hair.  It was funny that her face shape was similar to the wine glass shape and her hair was from the circles I had pressed into the gesso.  YAY!  I wanted to put a dress on the woman, so I sketched that in but couldn't see it.  So I used more gesso to cover the rest of the napkin.

 I stopped working on the piece for months when it was at this stage.  I was clueless what to do with her.  I liked it so far, but I knew I wanted to put wine glasses on the page too.  Clenching my teeth this week, I promised myself to finish it before starting on another project.   Here are some closeups of some parts of this artwork.